The Science of Politics

A year before the midterms, quarterly fundraising reports are already reshuffling expectations and causing some candidates to drop out. And candidates are spending almost as much raising money as they collect. That’s because in congressional primaries and general elections, the top fundraiser still wins 92 percent of the time. Danielle Thomsen finds that candidates are raising money earlier and in larger amounts than ever. And everything from who runs for office to who rules in Congress is now governed by money, even though most of the value is in signaling rather than actually using it to communicate with voters.

Many thought the second Trump administration would feature a confrontation between a Supreme Court intent on limiting executive discretion and an empowered president flaunting the rules. Instead, the Supreme Court has largely acquiesced to Trump’s moves, using the shadow docket to overturn lower court actions limiting Trump, even those from Republican judges. Adam Bonica finds that Trump has sought to purge and cut more liberal agencies but has been repeatedly shot down by lower courts. Yet the Supreme Court alone has often sided with the administration, making the courts much less of a check on executive power.

Join journalist Matt Iglesias and political scientist Stephen Tellis as they dive into the Democratic Party's challenges and possible futures. They tackle whether moderating ideological stances could win back disenchanted voters and discuss the potential of an 'abundance' agenda focused on local impacts. Iglesias highlights the pressure of factional dynamics, while Tellis explores how the conservative legal movement is reshaping executive power. The conversation navigates the path toward a successful Democratic reset by 2028, considering pivotal strategy shifts.

Texas, California, and Missouri are moving forward with plans for mid-decade redistricting to gain partisan advantage—with other states threatening to follow. They are not hiding the motive: President Trump asked Texas to gain Republicans seats and Governor Newsom is saying he needs to retaliate. Just how much has gerrymandering gained the parties in Congress? And how much is likely to change now? Eric McGhee finds that both parties are increasingly extreme in gerrymandering but that prior mid-decade redistricting gains have been small. Daniel Kolliner finds that Republican control of redistricting has led to large increases in seat share, with Democratic control gains limited to large states.

President Trump has pressured and attacked the Federal Reserve and is now trying to replace governors. What are the consequences if the Fed is losing independence and moving toward presidential control? Cristina Bodea finds that the Fed was never the most independent and is becoming less so in the face of public pressure. That could make a normally conservative institution move toward enabling inflation and government spending. We also talk about international comparisons, populist pressure on central banks globally, leader gender, and the role of tariffs and democratic backsliding.

As the next AI cycle begins, state and national governments are trying to keep up. And AI policy now matters for energy, health, education, foreign, and economic development policy as well. What can we learn from the early AI legislation? Chinnu Parinandi finds that partisan alignments and institutional capacity shape where and how consumer protection versus economic development AI policies appear in the states. Heonuk Ha finds an AI boom in congressional legislation with key thematic clusters—from innovation and security to data governance and healthcare.

American students are falling behind while local school boards are preoccupied with culture war controversies. Is local democratic control of schools a detriment to improving student outcomes? Vlad Kogan finds that school boards regularly prioritize the needs of teachers and administrators over students. Elections are unrepresentative and sometimes partisan and drive schools to distraction. He draws surprisingly positive lessons from post-Katrina New Orleans and Chicago school closures and argues for on-cycle elections that grade schools on student achievement.

The Republican Congress has quickly remade fiscal policy, with substantially more success than in Trump’s first term. How did they achieve so much more without compromise? How much will their routes around the filibuster matter for the decline of congressional appropriations? And are we setting up for a huge new step in presidential spending power: pocket rescissions? Molly Reynolds of the Brookings Institution is the expert on how Congress bends the rules of the filibuster to make use of partisan majorities. We discuss how much Congress is ceding power to the President and making tax and spending decisions even more partisan.

After President Trump bombed Iran, Democrats in Congress declared the action illegal. But it follows a long history of increased presidential control of military operations along with congressional deference and abrogation of war powers. How did we get here? Casey Dominguez finds that although the founders bestowed war powers with Congress, by the Spanish-American war legislators had expanded their view of the president’s powers and begun applying a more expansive view to their own party’s presidents. The role of nationalism, the rise of American power, and polarization all have echoes today.

Politicians are launching outlandish negative attacks and Americans have developed more negative views of the other party. But how connected are polarizing politicians and a polarized electorate? Mia Costa finds that political elites have more polarized views of the other side than the public but they still benefit electorally and legislatively from avoiding negative partisan attacks. Divisive rhetoric still breeds viral tweets, cable news appearances, and donations, but Americans mostly don’t like it or reward it. The polarizers just get more attention.